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Social media played an active role in the Egyptian revolution of January 25th 2011, but not on its own. With the help of a few factors, and other traditional media, the Egyptian revolution was possible. Inherent social troubles, tyranny from the top and political and economic dissatisfactions from below- are the major reasons of protests all-encompassing the Arab world (Ghannam, 2011). In the Egyptian case, the 30 year rule of former president Mubarak, the fact that he was planning to pass on presidency to his son and the success of the Tunisian revolution triggered dissatisfaction among Egyptians (Abdel Meguid, Al Banna, Korayem & Salah El Din, 2011). These factors needed support from social media in order to help disseminate news and events. It is hard to say that Egypt’s revolution was a “facebook revolution”, revolutions have happened throughout history, before any invention was even available (Dajani, 2012). This Egyptian revolution had been in the making for decades, no social media or internet interfered. Facebook served as a “revolutions operations room” where the organizing took place (Mubarak, 2011). It helped systematize people’s details such as where and how to gather exactly. The convergence of social media, satellite networks and traditional media proved crucial to the diffusion of the protestor’s messages (Ghannam 2011). But facebook alone cannot produce a revolution, all social media combined cannot do that. Social media can play a major role in spreading information and events, in supplying forums to communicate and exchange thoughts and in spreading certain ideas, all of which can be of great support to revolutions in terms of time.

The video is an abbreviation of the ideas stated above. I added a few images and videos that are correlated and speak out about Facebook and its relation to the Egyptian Revolution. The music I used in the video is composed and played by a close friend of mine. He composed this piece specifically for the Egyptian revolution and dedicated it to the Egyptian people.